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TV Tech
TV Tech
Phil Kurz

When it Comes to AI, Are We Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

FMC.

With the beginning of the 2024 campaign season and elections just around the corner, video watermarking expert Verance announced in November a collaborative watermarking initiative it’s spearheading along with the help of TV and digital news organizations as well as CE manufacturers to combat deepfakes.

The idea is to give viewers a way to tell if the media they are consuming has been tampered with or modified during distribution. 

While on-target—a recent poll showed more than half of Americans are concerned about the impact of deepfakes on the election—the effort raises a troubling question. Does the public even have enough confidence in the media to believe what it reports in the first place, regardless of whether the video is legit or a deepfake?

Consider the findings of a September 2022 Gallup poll. Thirty-eight percent of respondents had no trust in the media. Only 14% of Republicans said they trusted the media, while 27% of independents said they did. Driving the average of all respondents who trust the media to 34% were Democrats, seven out of 10 of whom said they trusted the media. Overall, only 7% of respondents said they had a “great deal” of trust and confidence in the media.

Perhaps Pew Research uncovered the reason why. Polls conducted in February and March 2022 found that 76% of the public said journalists should work to give every side of an issue “equal coverage.” Journalists on the other hand didn’t show a similar level of commitment to “bothsidesism,” as Pew dubbed it. Only 55% of journalists told Pew all sides of an issue should receive equal coverage.

Or maybe it can be chalked up to the public’s general inability to distinguish between fact and opinion. A February-March 2018 Pew Research poll gave respondents five fact-based and five opinion-based statements and asked them to identify what type of statement each was. Only 26% could correctly classify all five statements. Twenty-four percent got four right. The results for correctly categorizing opinion statements were somewhat better, but still poor. Thirty-five percent identified all five opinion statements correctly, and 24% got four correct.

While Verance’s effort to protect the public from deepfakes is commendable, it seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse. It proposes to use technology to solve a problem that is much more deeply rooted.

Before the public can ever trust a watermark the media provides for its content to head off deepfakes, they first must begin trusting the media in greater numbers. Maybe good places to start are more balanced coverage, a hard separation of fact and opinion and clearly identifying each.

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